Browsing by Author "Hamm, Keith"
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Item A Crisis of People or Politics? : Revisiting the Impact of Narrative Framing of Immigration in German Newspapers in 2018(Rice University, 2019-05) Schumacher, Erika; Hamm, KeithIn 2017, a report (Georgiou & Zaborowski) traced the media portrayal of the 2015 refugee crisis and of immigrants in European countries. The authors reported a general negative portrayal of immigrants in the news. Additionally, they showed a shift: the refugee crisis was initially described as a humanitarian issue that transcended boundaries; by the end of 2015, each country viewed migrants as an issue of national security. My research revisits the media narrative around the migrant crisis in 2018, specifically in Germany, which accepted an exceptionally large number of refugees. My research categorizes newspaper articles written on the topic of immigration over the course of 2018, finding that the issue of immigration has shifted narratives once again. While not necessarily making value statements on immigrants themselves, German print media presents positive images of immigrants in an economic context and negative images of immigrants in a societal context. Further, immigration is overwhelmingly an issue of politics and policy. In this way, the print media talks around immigrants, showing them as an issue of electoral politics instead of societal participants.Item Neither Hierarchy nor Chaos: The Emergence of Legislative Organization in the Colombian Congress(2022-04-22) Aroca, Maria Paula; Hamm, KeithThe literature on legislatures suggests a series of social choice, collective action, and individual decision-making problems that ambitious politicians face when making voting choices in legislatures. The most influential modern theories based on the US Congress focus on how politicians delegate power to central institutions that constrain legislative choices in order to solve these problems. In many contexts, however, legislators do not have incentives to delegate such authority. Using the case of the Colombian Congress, this dissertation is focused on exploring how legislators can also achieve their goals and policy ends using non-hierarchical forms of organization. Specifically, voting choices are constrained through a process of self-organization. This process happens without a central authority and is based on repeated individual interactions between legislators, which, over time, generate a system of legislative voting patterns sufficiently stable for legislators to lessen the problems inherent to policy making and successfully pursue their goals. The dissertation provides empirical evidence that the Colombian Congress has developed a structure of individual relationships that systematically influences legislative voting. The dissertation concludes with key implications for the understanding of legislatures.